Thus it came about that Jim took ship back to Trieste, leaving Monimé and Ian to go the following week to Alexandria, whence the boy and his nurse would Journey by a P. and O. liner direct to England. It was a blustering evening in early November when he arrived in London, and to his sad heart the streets through which he passed and the small hotel where he was to stay were dreary in the extreme. His brain was full of the sunshine of the Mediterranean; and the burning passion of his love for Monimé seemed to draw all his vitality inwards, and to leave frozen and desolate that part of his entity which had to encounter the immediate world of actuality.
Upon the following morning it rained, and for some time he lay in bed, staring out through the wet window-pane at the grey sky and the grimy chimney pots, dreading to arise and meet his fate. His first object was to find Mrs. Darling. She had always been understanding and sympathetic, and now she would perhaps aid him in his predicament. The news that he was still alive would then have to be broken gently to Dolly, and the situation would have to be handled in such a way that she would find it to her advantage to divorce him. His heart sank as the thought occurred to him that very possibly[225] she would welcome his return and refuse to part from him. In that case the game would be lost and life would be intolerable.
At the outset, however, his plans met with a check. An early visit to the flat where Mrs. Darling lived revealed the fact that she had rented it furnished, and the only address known to the present tenant was that of Eversfield. This did not necessarily mean that she was staying with her daughter, and Jim was left on the doorstep wondering what was the best way of getting hold of her quickly.
A sudden resolve caused him to hail a taxi and to drive to Paddington Station. He would catch the first train to Oxford, pay a surreptitious visit to Eversfield, and try to get into touch with Smiley-face, his one friend there. The poacher would give him all the news, and would doubtless be of assistance to him in various ways; and his reliability in regard to keeping the secret was unquestionable. Smiley was a master of the art of secrecy.
Jim was wearing a high-collared raincoat and a slouch hat, and, with the one turned up and the other pulled down, he would easily avoid recognition, even if, in the by-ways he proposed to follow, he were to meet with anybody of his acquaintance. And after all, since he would be obliged, in any event, to come back from the dead for the purpose of his divorce, an indefinite rumour that he had been seen might be the gentlest manner of breaking the news to Dolly. He wanted to spare her a sudden shock.
He had not long to wait for a train, and by noon he was setting out across the muddy fields behind[226] the houses of Oxford, munching some railway sandwiches as he went. The rain had cleared off, but the sky was still grey; and the mild, misty atmosphere of the Thames Valley filled his heart with gloom and brought recollections of the days of his captivity crowding back into his mind. He could hardly believe that he had been absent not much more than six months. He had lived through an eternity in that brief space.
Nobody was encountered on the way, and when he mounted the last stile, and stepped into the familiar pathway behind the church at Eversfield he was still a solitary figure, moving like a ghost through the damp mist.
It was his intention now to skirt the village, and to walk on to the isolated cottage where Smiley-face lived with old Jenny; but the silence of his surroundings, and the deathlike stillness of the little church, induced him to creep across the graveyard and to slip through the door into the building.
In the aisle he stood for a while lost in thought; while the old clock in the gallery ticked out the seconds. He felt as though he were a spirit come back from the dead; and, indeed, the sight of the familiar pews, the escutcheons, and the memorial tablets of his ancestors, produced in him a sensation such as a midnight ghost might feel when called out of death’s celestial dream to walk again amidst the scenes of his misdeeds.
Suddenly a new and shining brass tablet at the side of the chancel caught his eye; and he hastened forward, his heart beating with a kind of dread of[227] that which he would see written thereon for all to read. The inscription was truly staggering:—
In grateful and undying memory of James Champernowne Tundering-West, Esquire, of Eversfield Manor, who, after an unassuming but exemplary life, marked by true christian piety and an unswerving devotion to duty, met an untimely death, in the flower of his manhood, at the hand of an assassin, near Pisa, Italy, this stone has been set up by his sorrowing widow, Dorothy Tundering-West.
Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life.—Rev. ii. 10.
“Good Lord!” Jim muttered, his sallow face for a moment red with shame. “And in face of this, I have got to come back to life, so that this ‘sorrowing widow’ may divorce me, and thereby empower me to give the name of Tundering-West to my son and leave him in my will the property I abandoned! A pretty muddle!”
He turned away, sick at heart. “O England, England!” he whispered. “Dear nation of hypocrites!—at all costs keeping up the pretence so that the traditional example may be set for coming generations.... Presently they will remove this tablet, and instead they will scrawl across their memories the words: ‘He failed in his duty, because he hid not his dirty linen.’”
He almost ran from the church.
During the continuation of his walk he came upon two of the villagers, but in each case he was able to turn to the hedge as though searching for the last remaining blackberries, and so avoided a face-to-face encounter. His road led him past the[228] back of the woods of the Manor, those woods whither he had so often fled for comfort; and it occurred to him that before walking the further two miles to Jenny’s cottage he might whistle the call which used to bring the poacher to him in the old days. It was just the sort of misty afternoon on which Smiley was wont to slip in amongst the trees.
He therefore stepped into a gap in the encircling hedge of bramble and thorn, the straight muddy road passing into the haze behind him, and the brown, misty woods, carpeted with wet leaves, before him; and, curving his hand around his mouth, he uttered that long low whistle which sounded like the wail of a lost soul, and which more than once had struck terror into the heart of some passing yokel.
Thrice he repeated it, pausing between to listen for the answering call and the familiar cracking of the twigs; and he was about to make a final attempt when of a sudden he heard a slight sound upon the road some fifty yards away. Turning quickly, he saw the ragged, well-remembered figure dart out from the hedge into the middle of the road, eagerly running to right and left like a dog that has lost the scent. He was hatless, and his mop of dirty red hair was unmistakable.
Jim stepped out into the roadway, and thereat Smiley-face came bounding towards him, his arms stretched wide, his smile extending from ear to ear, and his little blue eyes agleam.
“Hullo, Smiley, old sport!” said Jim, holding out his hand; but he was wholly unprepared for the scene which followed.
[229]
Smiley’s knees seemed to give way under him, and, snatching at Jim’s hand, he stumbled and fell forward upon the grass at the roadside, panting, coughing, and laughing. “O God! O God! O God!” he gasped. “I knew you was alive, sir: I knew it in me bones.”
He pulled himself up on to his knees, and held Jim’s hand to his face, hugging it in a sort of frenzy of animal delight.
“Get up!” said Jim, sharply. “What’s the matter with you?”
“I dunno,” Smiley answered, sheepishly, clambering to his feet. “I felt sort o’ dizzy-dazzy like. I get took like that sometimes. I ’ad the doctor to me once: he told old Jenny it was my ticket home. That’s what ’e said it was: I heerd ’im say it to ’er.”
“Been ill, have you?” Jim asked, putting his hand on the poacher’s shoulder, and observing now how haggard the face had grown.
“I’ll be fit as a fiddle now you’ve come back,” he answered, laughing. “I knew you wasn’t dead! Murdered, they said you was; but I says to old Jenny: ‘I’ll not believe it,’ I says; ‘not with ’im able to floor I with one twist of his ’and. ’E’s just gone off tramping,’ I says. ’E’s gone back to the roads.... ’E never could abide a bedroom.’”
“Well, you were right, Smiley,” Jim replied. “I couldn’t stick it any longer, and so I quitted. But I mustn’t be seen, you understand. I’m dead. I’ve only come down here to get into touch with you, and find out how things are going on.”
“Friends stick to friends,” the poacher crooned, intoning the words like a chant. “I never ’ad no[230] friend except you. It seems like I given you everything I got inside my ’ead.”
They entered the wood together, and sat down side by side upon a fallen tree trunk. Jim questioned him about Dolly, and was told that she was living quietly at the Manor, a little widow in a pretty black dress; and that her mother sometimes came to stay with her, but was not at present in Eversfield, so far as he knew.
“Do you think she misses me?” Jim asked.
Smiley wagged his head. “I wouldn’t like to say for sure,” he answered; “but betwixt you and me, sir, that there Mr. Merrivall do spend a deal o’ time at the Manor. Jane Potts, his ’ousekeeper, be terrible mad about it. They do say her watches him like a ferret. It’s jealousy, seeing her’s been as good as a wife to ’im, these many years. But he’s that took with your lady, sir, he can’t see what’s brewing. Seems like as they’d make a match of it when her mourning’s up.”
“The devil they would!” Jim exclaimed, his face lighting up. “Why, then, she’ll be very willing to divorce me.... That’s good news, Smiley!”
The poacher looked perplexed. “Divorce you?” he asked. “Baint you staying dead, then?”
Jim put his hand on Smiley’s shoulder again. “Look here,” he said, “I told you once that if ever I confided my troubles to anybody it would be to you. Can I trust you to hold your tongue?”
Smiley exposed all his yellow teeth in a wide grin. “You can trust I through thick and thin, same as what you said once. They could tear my[231] liver out, but they’d not make I tell what you said I mustn’t tell; and that’s gospel.”
Thereupon Jim explained the whole situation to him, telling him how in a far country he had found again the woman he ought to have married, and how he hoped that Dolly would free him.
“It’s life or death, Smiley,” he said earnestly. “If my wife welcomes me back from the grave, and claims her rights, I shall put a bullet through my head, for I could not be the husband of a sham thing now that I know what it is to love a real woman. Oh, man, I’m devoured by love. I’m burning to be back with her, and with the son she has borne me. Don’t you see I’m in hell, and the fires of hell are consuming me?”
The poacher scratched his towsled red hair. “Yes, I see,” he said. “And I reckon her’s waiting for you over there in them furrin lands where the sun’s shining and the birds are singing. When they told I you was dead I says to old Jenny you’d only gone to those countries you used to talk about, where the trees are green the year round, and you look down into the water and see the trout a-sliding over mother-o’-pearl. ‘’E’s heard the temple-bells a-calling,’ I says, ‘the same as ’e sang about that day in the parish-room,’ I says, ‘and ’e’s just sitting lazy by the river, and maybe the queen of them parts is a-kissing of ’is ’and.’”
Jim laughed aloud. “Smiley, you’re a poet,” he said, “but you came pretty near the truth, only it was I who was kissing her hand.”
For a while longer they talked, but at length Jim proposed that the poacher should go at once to Ted[232] Barnes, the postman, and find out whether Mrs. Darling was at the Manor or not, and if not, perhaps Ted could be induced to tell him the address to which her letters were forwarded. “Say you want to send her a couple of ............